Quote

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Imagination
Invited
Montaigne
Less
Division
Horseback
Self
Locals
Induced
World
Local
Identities
Prejudice
Travelling
Across
Frontiers
Identity
Prejudices
Citizens
Exchange
Constraining

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The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
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Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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